An animated and interactive interface for visualizing dynamics of air quality change
Feng Qi, Assistant ProfessorDept. of Geology and MeteorologyKean University, NJ
April 09, 2009
The problem
Large amounts of data are being collected for local environmental monitoring and through funded research projects to monitor and model environmental qualities at various scales.
Time series data Present results
To expert? To the public, common audience
Traditional presentations of results
Traditional presentations of resultsTSP = 136.44684 + 24.52080 spr_ind + 15.20418 d_50 – 64.85563 wind_high – 37.85891 wind_low – 0.85512 Humidity + 9.45595 Precipitation – 0.00174 NorthBoundDiesel + 2.35774 day_ind + 19.21703 sum_ind – 0.00052981 TotalGasoline
Traditional presentations of results
Key words: Interesting? Engaging? Simple? Easy?
Key words: Public communication
Simple Animation Interaction
Animation
Eye-candy only?Our ‘eye-brain system is finely tuned to
seeing and understanding motion and change’.
Help generate new insights into dynamic processes that can be difficult with statistical analysis or static visualizations
Engage audienceReaders go into the map, especially if
interactions are allowed
Air quality data visualization
Key: simple, easy, fun, … Considerations:
Large amount of dataAnimation is good, and can represent lots of
data!However, we have very limited, short-term
visual memory---we can only absorb very limited information from visual stimuli
And if there’re multiple variables……
Air quality data visualization
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) methodsTemporal brushingTemporal re-expression (DiBiase)Cross-variable referencingBenchmarking (Harrower)Google finance charts……
To help common users ‘distill’ information (knowledge discovery by common users)
The animated sequenceThe animated sequence
The interactive time series interfaceThe interactive time series interface
Facilitate Knowledge discovery
Data PreprocessingOutlier detectionFeature selection
Data Mining Knowledge Consolidation Information Presentation
Facilitate Model Validation